Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave - Stephanie Barron [98]
“Her ladyship cannot do much else,” he replied grimly, assisting me into his carriage, “more's the pity. Had she occupation for her thoughts, she might bear her circumstances better.”
I stopped, half in the carriage, half out, and stared at him in consternation. “You mean she has nothing of an amusing nature by her?”
“Amusing? I should think not.”
I turned abruptly and stepped down, my feet as swift as my thoughts. “Do you wait a moment, Mr. Cranley,” I declared. “I know the very article to cheer her.”
WE WERE NOT LONG ON OUR WAY TO NEWGATE, IT BEING situated to the east of Portman Square, near the old walls of the City. In a different time, the Earl and the Countess might have been conveyed to the Tower, there to be lodged in chilly dignity appropriate to their station, though offering no more comfort than the prison thrown up in its shadow. As we approached Newgate, I quailed to think of the scaffold that might be erected before its doors, should Isobel be condemned to die. A public execution, with all the humiliation and popular carousing that habitually attends a Hanging Day, was too horrible to contemplate. I turned to Mr. Cranley. “Is it likely, my good sir—if it be that we fail in our efforts to prove the Countess's innocence—must she certainly hang?”
For the space of several heartbeats, the barrister offered no answer, his eyes upon the gloomy walls of the approaching prison. At last he turned to me with sober mien. “The courts are loath to impose such a sentence upon a woman,” he replied, “but the deliberate murder of one's husband—particularly a gentleman of the Earl's station—is not a clergyable offence.1 I fear, Miss Austen, that we have no alternative but to prove the Countess's innocence. And the Earl's as well.”
The carriage Raited before Newgate's stone gate, and Mr. Cranley jumped out, with a hand for me as I descended. We stopped an instant in silence before those dreadful walls, overlaid with writhing gargoyles and hung with chains; and then a wicket was slid back in the massive oak itself. We were treated to a beefy visage, with a patch over one eye, and a mouth possessed of very few teeth.
“Do you wait a moment, Miss Austen, while I speak to the porter,” Mr. Cranley told me, and approached the prison gate. His conversation was swiftly conducted—through the passage of coin from his hand to the other's—and the heavy gate swung open. We were led within the courtyard, cobbled and streaming from the residue of London's fogs; I suffered to think of Isobel's arrival here, a lonely object of contempt, without much of hope to sustain her. It was but another moment before we gained admittance from a trusty at the prison door, and were inside.”
How to relate the scene that greeted us?
A narrow, windowless, low-ceilinged place, lit only by torchlight, the better to obscure years of grime and a scurrying at our feet—undoubtedly from rats. An air so thick with smoke and odour as to be suffocating. A repeated clanging about the ears, from bolts drawn back or driven home—Kr, worse yet, from manacles shaken in despair. I looked about me furtively, not wishing to appear shocked, but Mr. Cranley divined my emotion.
“There is time yet to go back,” he said gently. “I would not think less of you, Miss Austen, did you call for my carriage.”
“Nonsense,” I replied, and affected an air of greater strength than I assuredly felt.
We were placed in the safekeeping of a man Mr. Cranley addressed as Crow, a peculiar person of stunted appearance, with an enormous nose and a heavy growth of dark hair, much matted. He wore on his person an astonishing number of garments, of varying stuffs and sizes—a veritable rag-picker's fortune, to my untrained eye. I learned later from Mr. Cranley that it was Crow's custom to buy the clothes of condemned men, piece by piece, in the days before their execution; the poor souls being desperate for some last sustenance, they were willing to barter all that they owned for the promise of good ale and maggotless bread. I